


Romeo and Romeo

by Janissa11



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-08
Updated: 2013-05-08
Packaged: 2017-12-10 18:26:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/788835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Janissa11/pseuds/Janissa11
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint's room is near the end of the second-floor west hallway. Phil has gotten to know a few of the other residents, a little, and more of their family members and friends. No one here is a short-timer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Romeo and Romeo

**Author's Note:**

> Tissue warning. In earnest. This is mildly AU, as it is set in a 'verse where pretty much everything is the same with the exception of the ability for couples to consummate, if they choose, a permanent life bond. There is no a/b/o content as such, although feel free to presume those gender roles are also present; they are not particularly relevant to this story.

Phil Coulson rises at the same time every day. 0625, five minutes before his cell phone alarm goes off. He starts the coffee machine and showers while it burbles, drinks the first cup of the day dressed in briefs and an undershirt, standing at the counter. 

He wears some combination of the same elements every day: a suit, although on Fridays it's a jacket and slacks; starched cotton shirt; tie; appropriate belt (black or brown). 

Every day he leaves the building exactly at 0730. On the way to the subway he stops at the flower stand and buys a bouquet of whatever catches his eye. Reds and purples, almost always, but sometimes he cannot resist sweet pink roses, or cheerful daisies. He selects several newspapers at the newsstand, tucks them alongside the flowers in the tote bag he carries for the purpose, and then he walks a block to the stairs down to his subway stop. 

It takes anywhere from thirty-five to forty-five minutes to go uptown to the hospital. He likes the crowded subway, the press of hurried bodies, the whiff of perfume and coffee and occasional body odor. He makes no eye contact, but neither does anyone else. He fits right in.

At his stop he walks a block and goes into the little bakery for a coffee and a bagel, or maybe a croissant. And a blueberry muffin, in the tote bag.

He knows most of the staff at the hospital. If not all by name, certainly practically all by their faces and demeanor. Today is Eleanor, resplendent in hot pink scrubs and smiling warmly at him. She is a sweet person, chatty and even-tempered.

“How is he?” Phil asks, refusing to let the permanent fear emerge.

Eleanor's smile only ebbs a little. “He's fine, Phil,” she says. Ebbing a little more: “The same.”

Phil nods. “I guess I better go up. He'll worry if I'm late.”

Her eyes look sad, but she nods, too.

Clint's room is near the end of the second-floor west hallway. Phil has gotten to know a few of the other residents, a little, and more of their family members and friends. No one here is a short-timer. The woman at the end of the hall, Susannah, has been here eighteen years, and although she is the most senior resident there are numerous others whose stays number in the double digits. 

Clint is practically a newbie. Only fourteen months, a hair over a year. 

He is where he always is. Seated by the window, too thin in one of the sweatshirts Phil has brought for him, his own, in fact, after Clint improved enough to visit, and Phil saw him shivering in a dirty Army tee shirt he refused to surrender long enough to launder. Phil had replaced it with his heaviest sweatshirt, and eventually brought more, until Clint could no longer be said to be cold.

Many things, yes, but not cold.

“Good morning,” Phil says softly, setting his tote bag on the dresser and taking out the flowers and the bakery bag. 

Clint looks around after a moment, head tilted slightly to one side. His eyes are gray-blue and familiar, and a stranger's, all at the same time. Phil has known him nearly fifteen years, since he recruited him, and in all that time he never saw the lost, untethered look that always fills Clint's eyes now. 

Now he never sees anything else, and he understands – he does – that this will not change. Not after ten years, or thirty, or a thousand and twelve.

“I brought you something.” Phil perches on the corner of the bed nearest Clint's chair and holds out the bouquet. Lilacs today, because it's spring, and their fragrance is sweet and powdery, distant as the cradle. “How are you this morning?”

He watches Clint take the flowers, nostrils flaring as he notices the scent, and he remembers waking up and feeling nothing there. Nothing at all. He lived after all, and Clint didn't.

Except Clint was alive, after a fashion, and it was only a life bond that had died. Died at the moment Phil Coulson did, gasping its last on the floor of the helicarrier, and Clint had regained consciousness after Natasha's concussive treatment and been swept away into the Chitauri battle on auto-pilot, his mind already beginning to splinter from the death of his mate, of their lifelong bond. 

He had made it three days before his abrupt collapse in his new room in Stark Tower, and Phil had awoken from his coma a month later and it was a week more before Fury admitted to him that Clint hadn't actually died. Only the intangible cord that had bound them together.

Clint frowns and turns back to the window. The flowers sag in his hand, dropping pale lavender petals on the floor. Phil rescues them gently and lays them on the table, and then pulls the other chair over, sitting near enough to Clint that their knees almost touch.

“Did you have breakfast yet? I brought you a muffin. Blueberry, of course.” He snags the paper sack and pulls out the food. “Did you eat?”

Clint's mouth works, but no sounds emerge. His brow is furrowed in concentration, his gaze fixed out the window, but his eyes are blank, turned inward. 

Phil knows better. Knows so well now, what not to do. He does it anyway, because the need to reach out and feel Clint there is as deep as the toughest bedrock, not understood by his brain but engraved in his bones, etched into every cell in his body.

And there is nothing there, no Clint, no hint there was ever a cable as strong as iron connecting them. Even the place where the cable had begun no longer exists. He is untethered, adrift, and maybe he's coping better than Clint, Clint who faced the double shock of death and then life after death, after the severing of a lifelong bond. But he reels anyway, smacks headlong into that nothing where once everything had been, and gasps and feels the beckoning maw of it, of the emptiness where Clint is lost.

At first, he'd believed nothing substantive had to change. He was alive, Clint was alive, and even without the steady heartbeat of a life bond he loved his mate with every fiber in his body. Nothing was different.

And as he'd watched Clint flounder and stumble and fall over and over again, battling that terrible dichotomy – he's dead, he's not dead, he's dead, he's not dead – he'd slowly – so slowly! – begun to grasp that this was what all of the literature was about. The sweetness and practicality of the life bond, and the utter destruction when it was broken. 

Fury had nearly fired both of them when they first bonded. Phil had raged at that, at that betrayal – was he or was he not the best senior agent on the roster? Was Clint not the finest marksman, and well on his way to being an equally gifted strategist? What kind of bullshit meant a life bond was a bad thing? They functioned as one, a perfectly tuned unit, and this was their reward?

But it hadn't come to that, not quite, and Phil had actually been grateful.

It was only afterward that he knew what had put that terrible look on Fury's face.

He catches himself on the corner of the table and doesn't fall out of his chair, and when he looks at Clint he realizes he hasn't even noticed. 

Clint doesn't eat the blueberry muffin, or drink the coffee. Phil drinks it himself after a while, wetting his throat while he reads the headline articles from the Times, the Herald-Tribune. Clint frowns out the window when Phil goes on a tangent, the godawful months in London and Scotland and the code words printed on the pink pages every day. Their handheld phones as large as bricks and nearly as heavy. 

Clint doesn't listen, and Phil doesn't think, reading and reminiscing and sipping cold strong coffee until he has to stop to clear his throat, and realizes he's crying. Silently and effortlessly, tears streaming and stopping up his nose. He carefully folds the paper and lays it on the table, and leans forward to cover his face, elbows on his knees.

A cold hand clutches his wrist, and he flinches, glares up and blinks at Clint.

“You're here,” Clint says, in surprise. “I didn't know you were coming.”

Phil turns his hand and wraps it around Clint's, wiping his cheeks hastily with his other palm. “I always come,” he says thickly. “Always, Clint. I always will.”

Clint's fingers are loose inside his own. Clint draws his hand free and reaches over to touch Phil's face, thumb wiping across his cheekbone. “You're crying,” he whispers.

Tears burn like napalm behind his eyes, his nose, and he can't seem to stop them. “It's all right, babe. I'm okay.” He lies without thinking, smiles without calculation.

Clint licks his cracked lips and frowns. “I keep thinking,” he says after a long moment, his voice wavering up and down the scale, cracking once. “I keep thinking that if – if I just look a little harder I'll be able to find you.” His gaze isn't quite focused on Phil's face. Farther, as if he were looking at him in a mirror's reflection. “I try so hard,” he whispers. “But you're never there.”

Phil coughs a sharp sob and grabs Clint's hand, presses his lips to his fingers. “I'm right here,” he says, louder than he meant. “I'm right here, Clint, look at me. Look at me!”

For a second Clint's eyes focus, narrow with concentration. It's a dream, maybe, a figment of Phil's desperate imagination, but for a moment he knows Clint sees him – not a reflection, not a memory, not the cell-deep echo of a bond now long dead – but HIM. 

“Clint,” Phil whispers. “Honey, come back. Come back to me. I'm right here, and I love you so much. So much I can't even say the words.”

He won't. He won't because he can't. Won't come back because no one ever does, not really. This half-life, this shadowy dream world, is the best anyone can hope for after the severing of a bond.

But it feels so wonderful, just for a moment, to envision going forward from here. Damaged, limping, no return to the effortless connection of a couple of years ago. Just – be. Together. Even if no fantasy will quite take him to the place where Clint is back at SHIELD, when they were partners in everything, even if he can't quite fool himself that far – he'll quit the job, take the early retirement he's been offered and they'll just live. And they'll be all right, they'll be okay.

He smiles, huffs a little laugh, and then Clint's eyes waver, wander, and Phil watches grief trickle in like clouds covering a sunny sky. Sadness, confusion, the eternal bitter circle Clint tracks all of his waking hours now. Clint was always a person of motion, of banter, of energy, and now all of that focus is inward, the futile struggle to make sense of something that will never, ever be there again.

Clint's dry lips shape Phil's name, and then he turns back to the window, staring, always watching.

Breathing in fast jerks, Phil lurches to his feet, staggers once and catches himself on the corner of the bed. His head is filled with a whirling, hissing noise, ears ringing, and he blinks to find himself in the hallway, near the stairs.

“Mr. Coulson?”

He starts, and sees a woman standing with her foot on the final step, watching him with concern. A nurse, or maybe a therapist, his mind glassily informs him. See the badge. Don't remember her name. Occupational or physical, don't know which.

“Mr. Coulson, are you all right?” she asks. Her face is deeply lined, warm brown eyes under slanted brows, watching him carefully. “Mr. Coulson?”

Phil's head is trembling on his neck. He feels as if he may explode, or perhaps implode, only a pop of displaced air when he is gone.

“I can't do this,” he says clearly. “Not anymore.”

The woman takes the final step and comes a little closer. Still a safe, empty distance. “Would you like to talk to someone? I can –”

“No,” Phil says crisply. “I'm done. I'm done talking.”

He takes the steps at a trot, passing sweet Eleanor without a word or a glance, and takes the door straight-arm. 

Outside, he stumbles and this time he doesn't catch himself in time, his hands are numb and his feet, too, and he goes down with a startled grunt. His knees give a snarl of pain, and shock makes him look down, shows him a little blood and the left leg of his slacks shredded over the knee.

“Sir!” Someone is behind him, someone is – “Sir, are you okay? Here, let me –“

“Get away,” Phil snarls without turning. His fingers are straight as boards; he can shatter the man's trachea with a single jab. “Get away from me.”

“Jesus, I was only trying to --”

“Please,” Phil grinds out. “Please.”

Footsteps, retreating. Phil closes his eyes against the cruel sun and breathes through his nose. In, out. Just like Bogota. In and out, Coulson, one foot in front of the other. Get your lazy ass in gear.

He moves like one of Tony Stark's robots, an automaton with a steep learning curve, and heaves himself to his feet. His knees hurt, especially the left one. He's barked the shit out of it, that's for sure.

His legs shake, but he makes it, one step after another, to the sidewalk. Natasha sits in her customary place, legs daintily crossed. Her face is lovely and impassive, watching with no offer of assistance while Phil walks slow as an old man, sags down next to her on the bench.

She holds out a bottle of water, condensation already beaded on the sides, and he takes it and drinks thirstily, letting some just trickle down his neck. He's hot, uncomfortable.

They watch buses come and go. People, hurrying or not, runners and couriers and people jabbering on cell phones, children struggling to keep up with a parent's fast stride.

Natasha had brought him, the first time he came here. Drove him in her little, flashy sportscar and waited outside for him, then as now. As far as he knows she's never come inside the hospital. Has not seen Clint since the day of his collapse.

Fingers close over his own, strong and warm and tight. He glances at her, but she only looks forward, her face perfectly composed.

“No one,” Natasha says evenly, “will blame you if you stop. No one, Coulson.”

“Na --”

“He wouldn't, either. He doesn't --” Her voice dips, and she lifts her chin and swallows. “He doesn't know when you come. He won't know, and even if he did he wouldn't want you to --”

“I'd know.”

Her hand loosens, and she nods slowly, never actually looking at him. “How many times?” she asks softly. “How many times have you tried? To stop?”

Phil lifts his face and feels the sunlight filtering through the leaves, down to his face. It's a ridiculously beautiful day. Clint would have loved it. These were his most restless days, when nothing could keep him indoors if he wasn't on assignment. Jogging, biking, badgering Phil to hop in the car and let's go find someplace to hike. Climb.

“Every day,” he says calmly. “I stop every day. And then the next day I come back.”

Natasha nods. “Are you coming to the office today?”

He should. It's been too long. He doesn't even know if he'll have a job much longer.

He glances at his knee, grimaces at the hole in his trousers. “No,” he says. “Not today.” He pauses, and then gives a quiet laugh.

Natasha's eyes are narrow. “What.”

“It's sort of Shakespearean, don't you think? I died, but I didn't die. Clint didn't die, but he did. And now --”

“Now what?” Natasha snaps. “Coulson --”

“It's a gorgeous day. I think – I think I'll take a walk.” He smiles. “Maybe a hike. Perfect weather for it, don't you agree?”

For a moment she looks uncertain, mouth drawing down in a moue of a frown.

This time he touches her hand with his own, a fast gentle squeeze. “Please give my regards to everyone.”

“I will.”

“Goodbye, Natasha.”

It is too beautiful for the subway. He walks, ducks into a drugstore for a bandage to cover his bleeding knee and then sees a French bakery across the street. A new one to try, maybe. 

He wonders if they make blueberry muffins, and goes to check.

-END-


End file.
